His latest book is To Sell is Human, where he dives into the
science of sales and explains how we can all learn to be better
at influencing others.

The full interview was over an hour long so for brevity’s
sake I’m only going to post highlights here.

If you want the full interview, I’ll be sending it out
with my weekly newsletter on Sunday. Don’t miss out
on more of what Dan had to say, including the biggest mistake we
all make when trying to influence. Join here.

Highlights from my interview with Dan:

1. We’re all in sales now

Eric:

So you start off To Sell is Human saying that now
we’re all in sales. Can you describe how that came about?

Dan:

Well, for starters, one of the things that I looked at was this
belief out there about disintermediation, that salespeople are
being disintermediated by the Internet. You have Expedia, you have Auto Trader, you have Amazon,
so we don’t need salespeople anymore. If you look at the numbers,
as you know, it’s just flatly not true. You’ve got one out of
nine people in the U.S. workforce. Their job is to get someone
else to make a purchase. Their job is to sell you a computer
system, sell you a new suit. Every time there’s a presidential
election, I go and get a new suit, so I did my quadrennial new
suit this afternoon. The guy there, he’s in sales, too. People
selling wheels, whatever. That’s a very significant number of
people. That’s one thing I really wanted to make clear.
This idea that the Internet is obliterating salespeople
is just not accurate. It’s obliterating some salespeople, but in
terms of the idea that it’s going to decimate the profession, it
turns out to be factually untrue.

The other thing is, I had a suspicion, as you know from
the book, that more and more white-collar workers are spending
their time in this thing that I call non-sales selling,
essentially persuading and influencing and so forth.
There really aren’t any kind of data on that. I went out and
tried to test the proposition. I went out and did this survey, as
you know, of 7,000 adult full-time workers. We basically
found people spending 40% of their time in this thing, making the
exchange, influencing and persuading.

I think it’s kind of an insight in that most of us think that
sales is sort of passé, that we don’t need them anymore. What I’m
saying is, on the contrary, one out of nine is still in
sales-sales, and the rest of us are in non-sales selling. This is
actually a bigger deal than we think. As for how it came
about, as you know, it’s the three E’s. I’ll take them in reverse
order. Ed/Med: If you look at the numbers, again, all the growth
in jobs in this country is in education and health care, which
are ultimately about changing other people’s behavior. They’re
ultimately about influence.

The second one, and I think this is the most interesting of them
of all is the idea of Elasticity… It’s the idea that, in
stable and predictable business conditions, segmentation of
function inside of a firm actually makes a lot of sense.
You do marketing, I do sales, she does accounting, he does
strategy, stay in your lane, everything’s working, that’s all
great. But when it’s unstable and unpredictable, it doesn’t
work very well. The segmentation doesn’t work. The opposite of
segmentation is elasticity. As you stretch across these
boundaries, you almost always encompass some form of sales.

2. Why sales is getting less sleazy

Dan:

The reason why people hate sales so much isn’t about the
act of selling. All that view of sales as sleazy and so forth is
really a view about information asymmetry. It’s not
about the act of convincing and making an exchange. I think
what’s happened is that it’s inevitably forced us to the high
road. I was talking to a friend of mine two days about this,
about the ethics of all of it. What I was saying is, like, okay,
I just think as a pragmatic fact, this information parity
is pushing more people to the high road. They might not have
taken the high road…The idea is that this information parity
forces people to the high road. It’s not that people have gotten
better; it’s just that the low road doesn’t work.

3. Glengarry Glen Ross and the new ABC’s of
selling

Eric:

Can you break down the ABCs?

Dan:

Yeah. Well, the old ABCs are Always Be Closing, A-Always,
B-Be, C-Closing…

So that kind of steamroller approach is actually not bad
pragmatic business advice when buyers of anything don’t have a
lot of information, don’t have a lot of choices, and don’t have a
way to talk back…

Boom! Run them over. That doesn’t work now. It’s now
Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity, A-Attunement, B-Buoyancy, and
C-Clarity.

4. Attunement: Seeing the world from someone else’s
POV

Dan:

Attunement, as you know, is perspective-taking, seeing
the world from someone else’s point of view… There
are some studies about how basically perspective-taking is more
of a kind of cognitive skill than an emotional intelligence
skill. Really interesting, and this is the kind of thing that you
might groove on, there was one study that I write about where
basically it was a negotiation. They instructed half of
the people to concentrate on what’s the other side feeling, and
the other one was to concentrate on what the other side is
thinking. Okay? So concentrate on what the other side is
feeling and what their emotions are; concentrate on what the
other side is thinking and what their interests are. It
turned out that that second group, the one that focused on
thinking and interests, did better. It did better for both sides
of the negotiation, so it’s actually a little bit more
muscular skill than that. I’ve actually written about empathy in
another book, and I realized like, hmm, these things are kind of
different. It’s really perspective-taking. That’s really
the key, to understand where someone else is coming from. It ends
up being a much quieter capability than the traditional suite of
stereotypical sales skills, sort of the glad-handing,
back-slapping approach.

5. “Buoyancy”: How to overcome rejection

Dan:

Beyond selling, I think it’s just really good life advice.
Ask yourself seriously, is this personal? Is the reason
that the setback was entirely your fault? In most cases, it’s
not. Is this pervasive? Does this always happen? People say “Oh,
this always happens,” but you have to ask yourself more
analytically, “Does this always happen?” It usually doesn’t.
Then, is it permanent? The number of things that are permanent,
that would ruin everything, are relatively small. That’s a very
helpful way to recast setbacks for people.

6. Clarity: Why problem finding beats problem
solving

Dan:

This idea that when the client, the customer, whoever,
knows precisely what their problem is, they can probably find the
solution on their own. It’s when they don’t know what the problem
is, or when you can surface the problem, or realize that the
problem that they think they have isn’t the problem they have.
That’s incredibly valuable. That’s an artistic skill, this idea
of problem finding.

Seligman and his colleague, Goetzel, I think his name is, l did a
lot of research on who were the best artists. This move from
problem solving to problem finding, from problem solving to
problem identification, is huge. I write about it. I think
there’s just a sentence in there, but one of the things
that really stuck with me was a survey of American school
superintendents and then business executives. “What’s the most
valuable skill today?” The school superintendents’ number one was
problem-solving. The executives had problem-solving, I was
amazed, at something like seven or eight, and their number one
was problem identification. It’s a big deal. This is what
entrepreneurs do. Entrepreneurs find problems, they surface
problems, and then come up with a solution to them.

7. How to pitch

Dan:

Basically, these two scholars, they started studying
Hollywood pitching. They did a very exhaustive study.
Basically what they found, which you know, I’m sure, from your
screenwriting days, is that pitching isn’t about
convincing somebody, pitching is essentially about inviting them
in.

That’s essentially their view. That changed my view on it a
little bit. I think pitching is like, “Are you with me?”
and actually that’s not the way to do it. The way to do it is,
“Here’s the pitch. What’s your contribution?” When the other side
contributes, it actually builds something, and it’s usually a
little bit better, but also the other side is more invested in it
and so forth. The idea of pitching is to begin an engagement with
somebody, not to necessarily convince them right there.
Then I outlined the six successors to the elevator pitch which
are all I think really interesting, backed by some of the social
science.